The latest edition of e-flux contains an interview with Joe Osae-Addo by Kwabena Appeaning Addo where they discuss Joe’s passively cooled house in Accra, Ghana.
Joe Osae-Addo in 2018 with architecture studentsInterior of Joe Osae-Addo’s house, AccraVerandah Exterior of the house with tree canopy, 2020
Kwabena Appeaning Addo: What inspired your design for the Inno-native House in Accra, Ghana?
Joe Osae-Addo: My first thought was “How do I create a building that responds to the weather better than most,” so that I don’t have to use air conditioning? That was my primary focus. I then began thinking about the landscape, about how trees can be used as the first line of defense against heat, and also about how to position a building so that there is no direct solar gain. I was working in Los Angeles at the time, and I learned that the worst heat comes not from the sun, but through conduction from the earth, through the floor slab. So I thought to raise the building by about a meter, removing all direct contact between the floors and the earth, and insulating the building with a pocket of air. Those were my design parameters.
KAA: What happened when you took those principles onto the building site?
JOA: The site and the climate drove the initial layout of the building. After pouring the raised foundation, the first thing I did was to plant mature trees. I didn’t want to plant seedlings, because I wanted the trees to cover the roof by the time construction was done. So, I took a drive out of Accra to the area between Tema and Shai Hills, where there is a natural forest of trees. I went on a rainy day when the soil was wet, with a truck and laborers, and dug out mature—but not fully grown—trees, approximately three meters tall. We brought them back and planted them immediately. A year later, when the house was done, the trees had fully grown in. The ground also had a high water table, so I planted papyrus plants, knowing that they would suck up water. But even so, the site is very wet. On a rainy day, the concrete walkway in front of the house gets wet both from above and below. For the driveway, I used gravel, not concrete, to allow water to flow through and absorb into the ground when it rains. The landscape was integral to the design from the beginning. It is what allowed me to create a cool building.
KAA: What about in the design of the building itself?
JOA: Glass louvres are typically undervalued in contemporary Ghanaian architecture, but they are fantastic at creating cross-ventilation. Many of the exterior walls include glass louvers, at times from floor to ceiling. The rest are made either of laterite blocks or of timber frame walls joined with a tongue and groove system. The interiors of these wood walls are covered with stucco plaster, which makes it feels like a typical cement block wall, but on the outside it is clearly wood. This construction technique, known as Type V construction, is how most buildings in California are built: a 2×4 timber stud frame, 24 inches on center. In my case, however, since there is no air conditioning, there is no need for insulation. The third type of wall in the house, which I am very proud of, is made of wooden slats with a mosquito net attached. The wooden slats have a half-inch gap between them so that air can come through, but because of the net, insects can’t. The interiors are therefore always aerated.
KAA: So does it work?
JOA: Yes, it works! If we had air conditioning, the timber studs would let out so much cold. But because the diurnal temperature variation in Ghana is not significant, designing for cross ventilation works so much better.
KAA: Can you further explain how the walls were designed?
JOA: At the entrance, for example, there is a wall that looks like it is painted concrete block, but it’s actually just plastered. To do this, we placed half-inch plywood against the timber studs, and then placed chicken-wire mesh over the plywood as the support for the plaster.
KAA: So on the inside, it looks like a normal wall, but on the outside, it has a wooden finish. What is it like to maintain the house?
JOA: Well, I haven’t touched it in twenty years.
KAA: Really?
JOA: Well, there was some damage to the surface of the wood deck in the back, but that was because of poor detailing—I shouldn’t have used galvanized nails, which can rust and rot the wood. I haven’t had to repair any of the vertical surfaces.
KAA: That means that it must have been really well constructed.
JOA: Yes, it was. I built it myself, so I made sure everything was right.
KAA: It also means that the wood was treated very well.
JOA: At that time in Ghana, kiln-dried wood wasn’t available. All of the wood we used had to be air dried, so I picked the hardest wood available, which was called “Odanta,” or iron wood. It’s expensive, but I knew that maintenance would be a big issue if we did not use quality wood.
KAA: Does the fact that it doesn’t touch the ground also help?
JOA: Yes! Termites are often an issue if you use wood in Ghana, but this was solved by elevating the building off the ground.
KAA: At the Presbyterian Boys’ Secondary School I went to, some of the teachers’ bungalows were made of wood and they sat on the ground, so I can attest to this! Can you speak further about the laterite walls?
JOA: The laterite walls are composed of compressed earth blocks. I made the blocks myself with the standard cement block formwork. They are stacked and kept together using cement mortar joints, and then finished with stucco. To make the render, we filtered laterite through a sieve to get the finest particles, and added a bit of cement and water. After it dried, we applied clear masonry sealer to protect it from the rain. This generally works, but direct rain can still create damage. So I placed some vertical and horizontal wooden fins on the balcony, so that water does not hit the building directly.
KAA: Is there any benefit to using laterite blocks over sandcrete, which is more typical in Ghana?
JOA: I don’t know the physics of it, but sandcrete seems to conduct more heat than laterite.
KAA: In the middle of the living and dining space, the roof material changes to a translucent acrylic panel. Why is that?
JOA: I wanted to bring in some light. Most of the roof is made of long span corrugated metal, so it serves as a kind of skylight. I didn’t use Perspex because over time it would melt. This is about twenty-years old, and it’s still in perfect shape. Though it occasionally needs cleaning from above to make sure the light doesn’t get too blocked.
KAA: What about the floors?
JOA: The house has polished concrete floors. But the flooring is actually timber, because the house is raised. At the bottom is the timber frame, then, on top of that, plywood, then roofing felt, then chicken wire, and finally concrete, which is primarily made of quarry dust to get as smooth of a finish as possible.
KAA: I also noticed that the kitchen and dining room are lower than the rest of the spaces.
JOA: Yes, they are lower because I was following the topography of the site, which slopes downward. If they were kept at the same level, it would have been very inefficient. Besides, it makes for a nice transition from living room to dining area.
KAA: What about the spatial organization of the rooms?
JOA: Well, the house has no corridors. So you either move from room to room, or use the wraparound deck to avoid disturbing people in adjacent rooms. The reason for this is that when you have an interior corridor, it is difficult to maximize cross ventilation.
KAA: What were some of the challenges with the project?
JOA: Well, one challenge was finding the right carpenters. In Ghana, we don’t often use wood to construct buildings, so getting workers to understand the details and the drawings was difficult.
KAA: How did you address this?
JOA: I wanted to complete everything in twelve months. Since the laborers and artisans were getting paid a daily rate, the longer the process lasted, the more I would have to pay. But since I was the contractor, I could set up systems to speed construction. After we built two bays of columns, for instance, the carpenters I hired to build the timber frames started prefabricating columns, so that we could erect them whenever we needed them. After a certain point, the process of construction became one of assembly.
KAA: Based on your experience, what advice would you give someone who wanted to create a similar design?
JOA: Designers need to make sure that they’re not putting materials in places where they’re going to be compromised very quickly. And, in general, the use of metal should be avoided. Rust is a big issue, particularly in coastal zones. The marine air is corrosive. I used louvres with plastic frames because the metal would have rusted by now. And if you use wood, after it rains, it should be cleaned. No matter how high quality the wood you use is, keeping it dry is best.
The architectural style was developed specifically for tropical climates, so its key design consideration was optimal ventilation and minimal solar heat gain. Elaborate building forms and abstract ornamentation later became characteristic of the style.
Although the movement began with colonial architects after the second world war, it was redefined by newly independent nations of the 20th century, who wanted to create an identity detached from their colonial past. The V&A exhibition spotlights India and Ghana’s nation-building projects following their independence from Britain in 1947 and 1957 respectively.
It begins with the early work of British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in Ghana. Until a few decades ago, European and colonial architects’ designs dominated the historical narrative of tropical modernism. This narrow viewpoint is currently contested and extensive research on post-independence architecture and non-European architects is being conducted.
The V&A exhibition attempts to redress this Euro-centric story. It centres around the lesser known architects whose input has been historically overlooked or erased. It celebrates their contributions to tropical modernism and the impact of independence projects on local architectural education.
The architecture of a new nation
Chandigarh, a planning project for Punjab’s new capital after India’s partition, is one of the architectural works featured in the exhibition. The city is a famous example of 20th-century modern architecture and urban planning. It was led by European architects Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew.
Works by these Indian architects are on display in the V&A show. There’s Eulie Chowdhury’s Chandigarh chair which was co-designed with Pierre Jenneret, Jeet Malhotra’s photographs of the city under construction and Giani Rattan Singh’s wooden model of the Legislative Assembly.
These architects were on the design team for the Capitol Complex, which comprised grand administrative buildings and monuments. The buildings were exposed concrete structures with sculpture-like forms and deep concrete louvres (slats that control sunlight entering a building).
Once dominated by British colonial architects, Ghana’s building industry expanded post-independence to include architects from Africa, the African diaspora, and Eastern Europe. Victor Adegbite, a Ghanaian architect, oversaw several public works as head of the country’s housing and construction corporations. He led the team for the building, popularly called Job 600, which was constructed to host the Organisation of African Unity Conference in 1965.
Ghana’s Africanisation policies (intended to increase the population of Africans in corporate and government positions) influenced the founding of the architecture department at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).
The department began by recruiting educators from Britain and around the world. On display is a student-made geodesic dome (lightweight shell structure with load-bearing properties), which was constructed during a teaching programme with American designer Buckminster Fuller.
Among the staff were Ghanaian architects like John Owusu Addo – the first African head of department. He designed new buildings for the university most notably the Senior Staff Club and Unity student hall included in the exhibition. The hall’s nine-storey blocks combine exterior and interior corridors to improve indoor ventilation.
The many dimensions of tropical modernism
Exhibitions like this are important because they educate the public on the strides made by academic institutions and cultural organisations in rewriting the history of tropical modernism.
V&A’s collaboration with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and Chandigarh College of Architecture was integral to the exhibition. However, the show only briefly addresses the contemporary issues of conservation, sustainability and the alternative histories of the style.
Institutions and organisations are now pushing for the conservation of tropical modernism in Asia and Africa. Although monuments like Chandigarh Capitol Complex, have attained heritage status, many are in decline, repurposed or at risk of demolition.
In India for example, the Hall of Nations, a group of pyramidal exhibition halls, was demolished in 2017. Social media platforms like Postbox Ghana and international collaborations like Docomomo International and Shared Heritage Africa project centre the African experience in documenting and reviving public interest in tropical modernism.
Unlike the architects and the experts celebrated in this exhibition, construction labourers are not as visible in historical sources because they were often unrecorded. Oral history’s ability to fill this gap diminishes with time, but we have a duty to avoid repeating the same erasure and omissions of the past. The legacy of tropical modernism is incomplete without addressing the contributions made by both professionals and labourers alike.
We went to the Exhibition Preview at the V&A on Wednesday 20th February to see the opening of the Tropical Modernism exhibition – a full review is being prepared and we’ll share it shortly (currently under review elsewhere first…) – here’s just a few snaps from the evening…
It was an intriguing exhibition for TAG to visit – not least because most of the exhibits have already featured on this blog over the years. Perhaps the biggest privilege besides viewing all of the material was talking to Michael Hirst and discussing his work at Tema again. Some of Michael’s photographs are in the exhibition too. The first thing that stood out however, was the large queue to get in – it’s not often a private view has a long line outside…
Michael Hirst and his photographs of Tema from the late 1950s
Some of the other highlights include seeing the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome restored and delicately hung from the ceiling. The last time we saw it was abandoned in the loft of a workshop at KNUST.
Buckminster Fuller Dome: in storage, KumasiDome restored and suspended from ceiling
There’s also some delightful perspective drawings by John Owusu Addo in the exhibition and a model of KNUST campus too. It was such a relief to see that these drawings are now being cared for. We produced some digital copies in 2016 and 2018 and hoping the share the full set of the precious drawings here soon.
drawings in the archive at KNUSTModel of the KNUST campusJohn Owusu Addo drawing at the exhibitionRestored model exhibited at the V&A
About TAGOur model of the Accra Community Centre was included alongside several other models, including Giani Rattan Singh’s timber model of Corbusier’s Assembly Building in Chandigarh, and an outstanding model of the Pragati Maidan in Delhi, by architect Raj Rewal (and foolishly demolished in 2017).
Accra Community Centre model, by David Grant and Iain JacksonRattan Singh’s timber model of Corbusier’s Assembly Buildingmodel of the Pragati Maidan in Delhi
It was great to see some of Pierre Jeanneret‘s furniture on display alongside the unexpected inclusion of Nek Chand‘s sculptures. It’s a curious exhibition pulling together a range of projects around Ghana and India, with snippets from Nigeria and elsewhere.
Jeanneret Furniture and Chandigarh sectionSculptures from Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, Chandigarh
An exhibition that we’ve been very much looking forward to opens this week at the V&A Museum in London. We’ve got a few of our models on display at the exhibition, and have been involved behind the scenes. There’s a large contingent from the Transnational Architecture Group making their way to various opening events this week and you can expect a series of reviews and critiques here shortly.
There’s also an article out today by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian that discusses the exhibition concept – and some of our favourite buildings.
The Building Africa Exhibition curated by Julia Gallagher and Kuukuwa Manful is currently showing at the Brunei Gallery SOAS until 16 March 2024. This is a smaller version of the exhibition which was first shown in Ethiopia as part of the State Architecture Research project at SOAS with Prof Gallagher as its director.
The SOAS exhibition is full of colour featuring, film, photography, a large-scale physical model-installation, publications and school uniforms and memorabilia. Located in the main gallery space, sections deal with the school history of Ghana, ‘state-built architecture in several African countries, highlighted in the exhibition by images of Ghana’s alternating seats of power, (Osu Castle and State House), and the African Unity building constructed in Addis Ababa. A conceptual installation structure evoking African unity has also been produced by the work of a young Ethiopian architect , Nahom Teklu whose umbrella structure enables exhibition visitors view in VR the ‘state’ architecture of different parts of Africa, it also harks back to the idea of pan-African unity where the umbrella unites all states on the continent.
The exhibition’s thesis that buildings shape us, is made clear to viewer and particularly how the state’s involvement is central to this process of power, positioning, and identity, particularly in Africa, from its colonial past to the now post-colonial contemporary situated-ness in Africa’s modern cities to secondary schools in Ghana in which the schools shaped would be future leaders. This was both by the design of the schools within a colonial frame but also school uniforms, motos and other paraphernalia of educational engagement.
State built institutions such as seats of government (state house in the case of Ghana) or stadia (exemplified in the exhibition by the main stadium in Kinshasa) have a more mixed relationship where they both are sites of power, and international events (the Muhammed Ali – Frazier rumble in the jungle, Kinshasa stadium film footage is on show) or symbols of African Unity (shown through AU building in Addis Abeba, which often results in tensions of perceptions and strategic plans for future use as regimes and state actors change.
The exhibition also connects the viewer to the research which has underpinned it. This includes the 2023 book Building African Futures edited by Gallagher and Emmanuel Ofori-Sarpong, and Manful; and Manful’s thesis – and a number of papers members of the State Architecture project have published as reports and in peer reviewed journals.
Building Africa packs a dense amount of African state-built architectural history into a a viewable gallery which audiences are invited to view, engage with and critique, helpful post-it notes are provided for this process. The curators explain that this is an adjusted version of the larger 7 panel exhibition and of the conceptual architectural installation has had to be cut short to fit the gallery space. This does not detract from this well-planned and already publicly pleasing and well- received exhibition.
A few years ago we reported on our Keeping Cool project and included a photograph of the Standard Chartered Bank on Accra’s High Street. The bank had been refurbished, radically changing its passively cooled perforated facade to a sealed glass envelope relying on air-conditioning.
We’ve just received updates from Accra that the bank has now been demolished. No details have been released on what is to replace the bank.
The same site has been used as a banking hall since the late 19th Century. Below are some of the photographs of the site revealing the continuity and change over the last century and the variety of architectural solutions deployed. Joe Addo kindly sent over some photographs of the shock demolition taking place earlier this month.
Accra High Street: Bank of British West Africa shown on the right hand side with the arched loggiaPostcard showing the Bank of British West Africa on the same site of Accra’s High Street, c1900Standard Chartered Bank with passively cooled facade. Architect? unknown, c.late 1950sStandard Chartered with new blue glass facade. Glimpse of Barclays bank on far left.July 2023: Standard Chartered bank being demolished [Courtesy of Joe Addo]
Iain Jackson, Ola Uduku, Ayo Olukoju, Claire Tunstall, Sam Ntewusu at Unilever, Port Sunlight
The objective of the visit was to visit and introduce Profs Olukoju and Ntewusu to the Unilever archive collection at Port Sunlight, particularly its subsidiary the United Africa Company’ (UAC)’s extensive holdings on Western Africa covering its various business interests in the region. The symposium which took place the next day involved presentations by Profs Olukoju and Ntewusu on the state of archives and archival research in West Africa, which was attended by Merseyside researchers and PhD students.
Professors Olukoju and Ntewusu at Unilever, Port Sunlight with bust of William Lever
The two-day visit also enabled discussions to be had about future collaborations at various levels, research, knowledge exchange capacity building at Masters degree level, and forms of impact for institutions in Western Africa and also the the UK and NW England in particular. Our thanks to all who contributed to the symposium. Particularly Claire Tunstall, and her team at the Unilever Archives, Dr Abraham Ng’an’ga of the Andrew Walls Centre, Liverpool Hope University, Alex Buchanan, Archival Studies, University of Liverpool History Department, Suzie Goligher, Afrograph Ltd, and all other individual and institutional contributors to the symposium.
MoU signed by the University of Liverpool’s APVC for the Faculty of Humanities Professor Fiona Beveridge, and received by Professor Olukoju, on behalf of the University of Lagos
The visit also coincided with the finalised signing off of the Memorandum of Understanding which has now been established between the University of Liverpool and the University of Lagos. The formal MoU, was signed by the University of Liverpool’s APVC for the Faculty of Humanities Professor Fiona Beveridge, and received by Professor Olukoju, on behalf of the University of Lagos
We are delighted to be able to host Professor Ayo Olukoju (Institute of African and Diaspora studies, University of Lagos) and Professor Sam Ntewusu (Institute of African Studies University of Ghana) who are visiting the University of Liverpool and also the Unilever Archives to explore the possibilities of future collaborative research and teaching activities across our institutions and others in NW England.
Both Professors are historians who have worked with archival sources in their research in West Africa. They have generously agreed to share, through this seminar, the challenges and issues with working with archival material and sources from a West African perspective and also some of the hopes they have for future collaborations.
Do join us to hear their views and also join the conversation – how do we make the most of archives in the 21st century in different locations and places? Importantly do we need to decolonise the archive, and if so how?
Hosted by the AHUWA Research centre in association with Unilever Archives, School of History and Institutes of African Studies and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Ghana, and the University of Lagos
This is the first article in a series that considers reflections on the value of interpretation in combination with the technical practice of cataloguing, authored by CCA staff and invited scholars and introduced by Martien de Vletter. Here, we examine changing terminology. CCA cataloguer Jennifer Préfontaine considers context and the use of the term “peon” in cataloguing the Pierre Jeanneret fonds, and Michele Tenzon, Ewan Harrison, Iain Jackson, Claire Tunstall, and Rixt Woudstra sift through reworkings that were made in the development of the United Africa Company archives.
The Importance of Context
Jennifer Préfontaine weighs meaning and intent when cataloguing archival materials
During Sangeeta Bagga’s Find and Tell residency in June 2019, we—the cataloguers at the CCA—came across material using a word with which we were uncertain. A plan drawing, held in the Pierre Jeanneret fonds that Bagga was studying, labels “Peons’ Houses” as the title of a project in Chandigarh, from 1952.1 From definitions found in print and online dictionaries, we felt that “peon” could be understood as harmful in some contexts but neutral in others. A word can have different meanings, different geographies, and even different histories, in particular colonial histories. In cataloguing work, the choice of vocabulary has important implications in how researchers access and understand information. We needed to consider, is there a problem with the use of the word “peon” when identifying people?
We learned that the word “peon” has different meanings and origins depending on where and when the term is used. Among other definitions, it means a labourer or a non-specialized worker.2 In Latin America, especially in Mexico, a “peon” has additionally come to denote a labourer that has an obligation to work for their employer until their debt was paid off.3 This type of “labor practice”4 has served as the basis of what would become known as “peonage” in the period after the abolition of enslavement in the United States, where many African American freedmen and freedwomen with limited options were forced and bound into this system that maintained an involuntary servitude.56 It seems within this American context that the use of this word in cataloguing should be reassessed. However, comparatively, in South Asian countries, particularly in India and Sri Lanka, the word “peon,” brought by the Portuguese, historically meant a foot soldier or a police officer.7 These days, it refers, in an Indian context, to a messenger or attendant, especially in an office,8 designating the entry-level position in governmental and non-governmental organizations.910
Considering that the materials from the Pierre Jeanneret fonds that include the word “peon” in their descriptions are related to Chandigarh, would it be acceptable to use the term despite the negative connotation it bears in another context, especially the American one? Shall we use a different term, or keep this “contentious” word with the possible addition of a contextual note?
As the CCA is an international institution located in North America, we wonder if it is preferable to remove a word that is potentially harmful from our descriptions, even if it remains in use and seemingly appropriate in other cultural contexts. What about the research behaviour of our users? Experts on Chandigarh, particularly on Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s works, might be expecting the word “peon” and search for it in our catalogue. In order to understand the use of this term within the framework of the study of Indian architecture and society, we decided to reach out to experts of this field of research.
For Dr. Sangeeta Bagga,11 Principal at Chandigarh College of Architecture, Vikram Bhatt,12 author of Blueprint for a hack, Resorts of the Raj, and After the masters, and Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh,13 author of Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier and One Continuous Line, and editor of Rethinking Global Modernism, the word “peon” is an appropriate term used to designate an entry-level position at government levels in India. However, they point out that private corporations do not generally use the term anymore. Bhatt mentions that an equivalent word is “chaprasi,” and there might be other equivalent terms in other regions of India. Bagga argues that, although “office boy” is the term currently used in the private sector, “peon” still describes a position that allows people to work in dignity in a non-technical job, and people in India do not necessarily associate the word with a colonial background. It was institutionalized under the British period, but it still is in use today, without any negative connotations. Both Bhatt and Prakāsh acknowledge that while the term is still in use, it is not a word used in everyday conversation. To them, it could carry derogatory implications, depending on how it is used.
Bagga and Bhatt also mention that Chandigarh is a city that was laid down to a precise hierarchy initially with thirteen types of government housing in which the “peons” were at the lowest end.14 Bagga adds that with Jane Drew and Pierre Jeanneret’s work, it was the first time that the “peons” had planned housing accommodations.15 She underlines that the architectural drawings and other materials attest to this nomenclature; this type of housing was specifically called “peons’ houses,” as is depicted in the plan’s title. If the word is absent from the description, how would a researcher find it?
We might not be able to dissociate the use of the word from the context in which it appears. Prakāsh recommends keeping the term with respect to the Pierre Jeanneret fonds, noting that there is not a “right” interpretation of a word, certainly not based on an “original” meaning. For Bhatt, for as long as there have been contacts between the Western and Eastern worlds, languages have mutually influenced each other. With this in mind, Bhatt said that he would not be hesitant to use this word, but cataloguers should certainly recognize the different contexts in which it is used.
From these discussions, it seems apparent that the word “peon” carries different weights and meanings based on its context. All three experts recommend that we continue to use “peon” in our descriptions as part of the title field, and that we should add, if relevant, a contextual note explaining the word. As we recognize the importance of examining the changing meaning of words over time and context, especially when they are used in relation to how you refer to people directly, processes like this one, will help us set guidelines for more mindful descriptive work.
We would like to thank Sangeeta Bagga, Vikram Bhatt, and Vikramāditya Prakāsh for sharing their thoughts on this topic.
Reworking, Recaptioning, Moving Beyond
Michele Tenzon, Ewan Harrison, Iain Jackson, Claire Tunstall and Rixt Woudstra examine the Archives of the United Africa Company.
The Unilever Archives in Port Sunlight, United Kingdom, host a vast collection of items documenting the United Africa Company (UAC). A wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever, the UAC was a vast trading and manufacturing empire that itself in turn owned and managed numerous subsidiaries ranging from retail, textiles, timber, and raw material extraction mainly, but not exclusively in the British West African colonies. The scale of the UAC venture throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the company’s role in colonial exploitation, as well as its economic and political manoeuvring into the post-Independence period, render its archive both a problematic and rich repository to catalogue and analyse. Archives have been the subject of a body of theoretical writing from post-colonial perspectives. This has framed the archive as both a locus of power and a technology of domination in and of itself. As the archive of the largest British business in West Africa, and one deeply implicated in the colonial patterns of resource and capital extraction in the region, the UAC archive can equally be theorised in this way. Yet, the UAC archive is also punctuated by moments of hesitancy, contestation, and challenges to the UAC’s attempted hegemony.
The UAC produced an archive as a by-product of the everyday transactions of business in the African colonies: its reports, board minutes, marketing plans, press releases, and ledgers have subsequently been ordered, catalogued, and cared for by a team of curators and archivists. But the UAC also pursued archival impulses of its own: UAC staff collected maps, African artworks and ephemera, personal correspondence and memoirs, as well as taking, collating and cataloguing thousands of photographs between 1880 and 1980. This impulse to collect and catalogue the African world around it shows the UAC’s attempts to impose an archival logic on the diverse, even unwieldy, business empire that it controlled, or attempted to control.
For architectural historians, the photographic collection is of particular interest with its bias towards recording buildings, places, people, and special events. The vast amount of visual material was produced by employees working for different subsidiary companies, each with their own objectives, vantage points, and outlooks. The contributors and content are also diverse in their geographical reach and emphasis, with records spanning vast tracts of the African continent, as well as smaller forays into the Middle East, India, and the Americas. Overall, and in coherence with the nature of a corporation which was indeed multiple, internally diverse, and geographically spread out, the collection appears as a corpus of interrelated but distinct archives each with their own provenance, consistency, detail, and granularity of data.
Considerable effort and expense were devoted to producing and presenting this photographic material. Each subsidiary produced its own documentary evidence by developing a visual record or compendium of their businesses that sat alongside the accounting records and lists. In providing sound evidence that business activity was taking place, the photographic medium was particularly useful to the parent company. Taken with a specific agenda and focus, the photographs were processed and printed before being selected to feature in specially produced albums and often accompanied by printed captions or handwritten comments. In many cases, the photographs became a surrogate for travel as many of the directors and business managers had never visited Africa and had no first-hand conception of what their business interests and assets looked like.
The images demonstrated that stores had been built, that goods were properly stocked on the shelfs and that everything was ‘as promised’. It provided reassurance for owners and shareholders, but also became a form of advertisement as is reflected by the careful organisation of these documents in the archive’s Public Relations folders. Through the photographs, distance and geographical separation seemed less important as the visual evidence which they offered ultimately delivered a sense of proximity by bringing a particular version of Africa back to the European shareholders. Photographs were meant to create a familiarity which could justify the company’s overseas presence and show that a colonial territory was ripe for development, therefore reassuring investors as well as European staff.
Because of the peculiar role of the photographic documentation for UAC’s activities, the forms of their collecting, defining, and claiming, offers a vantage point from which we can see how the company viewed, perceived, and chose to record the African social and physical environment. The image library was not fixed – it was added over time, revisited and modified. Titles were remade, notes were added, reflecting not only the transformation of the built environment, such as the extension or refurbishment of the company’s premises, or the acquisition or selling of properties, but also the shifting political situation after elections, riots, or strikes and the resulting legitimacy challenges that the company faced.
Such reworking of the archive is especially evident in those sections of the archive in which photographs have been selected and mounted onto cards, as a compiled photography library arranged first by country, then by themes. This collection was compiled to assist the production of marketing reports, company magazines, newsletters, press releases, and advertisements. The production of these publications and public relations material required the finest images and a cataloguing system allowing them to be quickly located. The notes written on the cards indicate that the UAC staff exercised a control towards what was deemed appropriate and suitable for the company’s image.
On some of these cards the captions were edited replacing terms which were perceived as outdated or inappropriate. Hence, an image described as “Native workers” was subsequently crossed out and replaced with “African workers”, before being relabelled again as “Employees”. In other instances, “African huts” was replaced by “African homes”, and “European Housing” was renamed “Management Housing” to reflect the Africanisation process of the 1950s – the recruitment and promotion of African staff within the company – which the UAC had embraced as a strategy to repair its legitimacy during the decolonisation phase. Some other images, instead, were marked as ‘to-be-withdrawn’ because the signage of shops of factories employed colonial toponyms which, after independence and for obvious reasons, had become offensive for African audiences. Whereas an image of Ibadan showing a district of low-rise houses built with adobe bricks was deemed no longer usable as it probably conveyed an unwanted sense of precariousness to the public and especially to potential investors.
We don’t know who exactly was making these decisions and how frequently the images were reassessed and relabelled. Unlike the archiving process where archivists generate titles, here they formed part of an image library. However, the fact that the photographs, rather than being re-mounted onto new cards were instead amended by striking through older labels, suggests that perhaps this context was considered valuable, if outdated. Nonetheless, letting this meta-analysis of the archive and its shifting cataloguing and labelling strategy to emerge, required challenging the traditional way in which archives are experienced.
Moving beyond the catalogue
We rarely get to see the archive in the way that one can peruse the books of a library. Instead, we experience it with no direct access to the stores and therefore no opportunity to examine the collection in person. In most cases, files are brought to the researcher after consulting a catalogue, making requests and completing slips and are examined one file at a time. While there are obvious reasons for such restrictions which aim at ensuring the integrity and safety of the material, the necessity of surveillance imposes an examination of the material in extremely compartmentalised or limited ways.
In our research project ‘The Architecture of the United Africa Company: Building Mercantile West Africa’ we have questioned this approach and attempted a different procedure that granted the research team access to the archival storage spaces. ‘Open access’ to the collection has been granted to the research team which has enabled browsing and the ability to quickly sample a box or file without even removing it from its location in the storeroom. The research team has been given extensive training in basic archive procedures, manual handling and health and safety. Retrieval slips were still completed and utilised, but the physical act of obtaining the files and accessing the store rooms was granted to the research team enabling the archive team to focus on their day to day work. The ability to compare boxes, view multiple files, or simply randomly ‘dip’ into boxes has enabled a far greater appreciation of the entire UAC collection, has accelerated our ability to ‘get through the material’, and also reduced the labour for the archives team. Viewing all the photograph albums on the shelves and to see how one album compares in size and scale to the others as well as the ability to visualise the files and their arrangement has helped us to understand the business structure in ways that would not have been possible otherwise.
This procedure, which was made possible by the prolonged collaboration between the academic team and the archive’s management team, has enabled a different working method to emerge. If the re-captioning of UAC’s photographic collection testifies how European capitalism coped with political change and pragmatically adapted itself to the shifting paradigms in the decolonisation phase, acknowledging such additional layers require ‘moving beyond’ the catalogue. The stratification of meanings and orientations which took the form of an almost curatorial approach to the cataloguing of the photographs reveals the biases and the shifting sensitivities of the actors involved in the production and management of the archive. However, such a critical interpretation of descriptive practices requires questioning the traditional interface between archivist and researchers, ultimately allowing engagement with the archive as a complete and stratified entity.
Notes
1 The term “peon” is also found on other material from the Pierre Jeanneret fonds.
2 The word has several meanings across times, languages, and cultures. Not all of them will be covered in this text. It also refers to the pawn in a chess game and to a low unit in some strategy computer games, for example.
3 William Wirt Howe, “The Peonage Cases,” Columbia Law Review 4, No. 4 (April 1904): 279.
4 Pete Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865-1900,” The Journal of American History 66, No. 1 (June 1979): 89.
5 Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery,” 1979.
6 Peonage is not exclusive to the United States. Various forms of “peonage” have existed or still exist across the world.
7 Collins English Dictionary, s.v. “peon,” accessed November 15, 2021, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1981), s.v. “peon.”
11 Dr. Sangeeta Bagga, Zoom meeting, November 19, 2021.
12 Vikram Bhatt, Zoom meeting, November 25, 2021.
13 Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh, Email exchanges, November 2021.
14 At the request of Jane Beverly Drew, one of the three architects with Pierre Jeanneret and Edwin Maxwell Fry responsible for the design of most of the government housing, an additional fourteenth type, known as “cheap houses,” was designed by Drew for, the previously unaccounted for, government employees who were earning the lowest-wage. Kiran Joshi, Documenting Chandigarh: The Indian Architecture of Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell Fry, Jane Beverly Drew (Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd.; Chandigarh, India: Chandigarh College of Architecture, 1999), Volume 1, 43. Sarbjit Bahga and Surinder Bahga, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret: Footprints on the Sands of Indian Architecture (New Delhi, India: Galgotia Publishing Company, 2000), 131.
15 Bagga also adds that this new housing typology for the “peons” continues to this day, with the same purpose, function, and responsibility of roles.
Dr Christopher Turner co-curator of the exhibition watching film featuring Ola Uduku
Press Cuttings:
“La Biennale di Venezia and the V&A present Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa. Organised in collaboration with the Architectural Association (AA), London, and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, this presentation at the Biennale Architettura 2023 critically reflects on the imperial history of Tropical Modernism through an analysis of the work of the Department of Tropical Architecture and a dozen key projects. It explores the ways in which this distinctive architectural style was initially developed and employed as a tool to support colonial rule before being adapted by West African architects to promote the excitement and possibilities of the period that followed Ghana becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957.
Curated by Dr Christopher Turner (V&A) with Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed (AA), the Venice presentation in the Applied Arts Pavilion is centred around a multi-channel film installation featuring interviews with surviving protagonists and footage of remaining buildings. Responding to the theme of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition conceived by Director Lesley Lokko, who writes ‘Africa is the laboratory of the future’ in her curatorial statement for the Biennale Architettura 2023, the presentation also lays the groundwork for a larger exhibition scheduled to take place at the V&A in London in 2024.”
Transnational Architecture Group 
